For the Engineer, a Death on the Tracks Means Horrifying Memories

Bruce Shelton, a conductor, has seen the number of fatalities on Caltrain's tracks rise, with 16 deaths so far this year.Credit
Annie Tritt/The Bay Citizen

The number of deaths is spiking this year on the tracks of the 77-mile Caltrain commuter line between San Francisco and Gilroy. With the 15th and 16th fatalities taking place within an hour of each other on Dec. 3, the total is nearing the 1995 high of 20 fatalities.

Many of the deaths are suicides, as 11 have been determined to be so far this year.

The engineers are the last people to see the victims alive. There is no way to stop a speeding 400-ton train in time. There is also no way to forget the sight or sound of death on the tracks.

One of those killed on Dec. 3, Donald Larson, 48, of San Jose, was hit by a northbound Baby Bullet in Palo Alto. A week earlier, Gregory Brown, 54, of Redwood City, died in the same spot in front of the same train. The same engineer hit them both, said Alex Cano, chairman of the local train engineers’ union. No further details have been released about their deaths.

Less than an hour after Mr. Larson died, Jayne Cox, 27, of Folsom, was killed by a southbound train north of the Menlo Park station. The incident is being investigated as a suicide.

Christine Dunn, a Caltrain spokeswoman, said the deaths had an effect on everyone at the agency, from the engineers to the people who answer calls from passengers. “This is why the agency is heavily involved in community suicide prevention efforts that make a proactive effort to deal with the underlying causes of this complex problem,” she said.

According to papers published in psychiatry journals, engineers who witness death on the tracks — suicide or not — are susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder and the conditions that come with it: anxiety, insomnia and depression.

“The issue here is the profound amount of helplessness at the moment of impact,” said Elana Newman, a psychology professor at the University of Tulsa specializing in responses to traumatic life events. “The core aspect of trauma is you see it and there’s nothing you can do, and that’s the part that’s the most problematic.”

It was a sunny Easter Sunday five years ago when Sean Morgan, driving a train into a San Francisco tunnel, saw something lying on the tracks. At first he thought it was debris. “But then,” he said, “the person looked up, and it felt like he looked right at me — just eyes as big as dinner plates.”

Mr. Morgan pulled the emergency brake, but the train continued 800 feet before it stopped. Mr. Morgan had experienced a suicide on the tracks before, but this death of a homeless man stuck with him. It was the eyes, he said, and the sound.

“I’d hear the sound when I’d try to go sleep,” Mr. Morgan said.

Although Caltrain has spent millions of dollars in suicide prevention, reaching out to local communities, and erecting fences and signs along the tracks, Mr. Morgan’s experience is not unusual. Mr. Morgan, who has been a Caltrain engineer since 1996, said that of all the other old-timers he knows, only one had not hit and killed someone on the tracks. New hires to the line, which is operated by Amtrak, are told that it is a matter of when, not if.

Amtrak has a system for dealing with the incidents. Engineers get three days off and can take more time if needed. They receive calls from a professional counselor and a volunteer peer counselor.

Bruce Shelton, a Caltrain conductor for 15 years, became a volunteer counselor after he experienced two fatalities in 10 days. It is the conductor’s grim duty to find the body or what is left of it. “My second one was a suicide,” Mr. Shelton said. “When I went out to determine what the status was, I found a landscape quite literally of body parts.”

“You feel sadness,” he added. “Any loss of life is tragic, especially as the result of a suicide. Somewhere along the line, someone just missed a cry for help.”

Not every engineer gets over the sadness. Mr. Cano, the union chairman, said that one engineer had a teardrop tattooed under his eye after his train hit and killed a toddler who had wandered onto the tracks.

“It was so traumatizing to him; it totally changed him,” Mr. Cano said.

zelinson@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2011, on page A37A of the National edition with the headline: For the Engineer, a Death on the Tracks Means Horrifying Memories. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe